I am curious if anyone else would support the concept of a single ERPNext instance that can support mutiple companies - to also be able to support multiple websites. (One to one mapping per company)
The principle use case is clear to me.
If a client has several companies the idea of trying to manage them in a single ERP instance vs multiple companies requiring different ERP instances would be far superior solution.
Each company could still preserve its own products, etc… but the websites running on different domains for different reasons would render from the single ERP instance. (Make sense?)
My team would be willing to financially support this effort if there is interest in adding this to the core.
6 Likes
Hi @Steve_Simonson,
this is somewhere at where multitenant versus multi-company is a key topic. Multitenant would cover your needs out of the box and map to domain names.
With companies, this would get somewhat more complicated. However, there is a quick workaround we have in place in some cases: you can implement a simple host-name switch as a JavaScript and use this to select the required homepage (define the web-pages normally, select from the switch)
Something like
window.onload = function () {
if (window.location.hostname.includes("your-domain-1")) {
window.location = "route-1";
}
else {
window.location = "route-1";
}
}
This does not cover the webshop, though…
4 Likes
I appreciate the feedback. Ulimately managing multiple webshops is the real objective.
If we have BRAND that sells in the USA that might be brand.com. That same BRAND may have a brand.ca and a brand.co.uk and a brand.de, brand.fr and so on.
The item level fields could be augmented to include the multiple languages, different dimensions, etc… but the inability to make a webstore is an opportunity.
In the absence of making a multiple webstores/sites work at the company or brand level perhaps mapping more shopify or woocommerce integrations to items or brands would be something to consider.
Anyway food for thought. eCommerce is the fastest growing part of the global economy and there is alot of opportunity in that market. Again my team and I are willing to help fund any enhancements that are helpful in this regard to the core.
3 Likes
Hi @Steve_Simonson
you can create many sites and map many domains
bench setup add-domain [url-site] --site [site]
bench config dns_multitenant on
bench setup nginx
sudo service nginx restart
2 Likes
Hi @Steve_Simonson
I agree with your rationale about the possibility of having more than one website per tenant.
I am currently exploring solutions for this also. Have you found a way to achieve this?
I am leaning towards developing a separate frappe app to work alongside erpnext, that will allow the creation of additional custom websites accessed under different domain names. The existing website could be used for the parent organisation and the new websites to be used for brands/subsidiaries which are managed by the parent organization.
I’m thinking that changing the current website implementation at the core to allow multiple instances adds a layer of complexity which could cause unexpected results for current production environments Could be a recipe for disaster when its time to update.
Some of the features I would like to see in the new websites app would be:
- Visual Page Design (drag and drop maybe)
- Custom Domain Name
- E-commerce functionality
- Display filtered content (display Doctypes relevant to the website only)
All feedback is appreciated.
If you are interested in collaborating/contributing, get in touch.
Thanks
Onis
2 Likes
Hi Onis,
We (Steve and I are both part of Parsimony) have been looking at this issue for awhile. Our current thinking is that e-commerce on ERPNext is a pretty long road. Multi-websites is certainly part of it, but as you point out, there many projects to tackle. (1-page cart, guest checkout, web themes, and 3rd party integrations are just a few.). While we remain interested in supporting the community as it grows ERPNext’s web capabilities, we are focusing on the WooCommerce functionality in the short term.
There is also some good work going on by the team at Digithinkit on their AwesomeCart.
Hi @MichaelPinkowski
Thanks for reaching out, your feedback and contribution is highly appreciated.
The links you provided are very helpful.
By focusing on “WooCommerce functionality in the short term”, do you mean working on the integration of ERPNext with wooCommerce ?
We also rely heavily on integrations, but frankly they can be fragile in terms of data consistency, security, access reliability and the list goes on. I would love to see everything under one roof as one source of truth.
I agree that the road to e-commerce and multiple websites could be a long one.
However, I believe there is a tremendous opportunity for ERPNext to cater for diversified organisations.
I notice that there was some work done on multi site for version 11 but never made it into core release.
Is this initiative expected to be merged into frappe core anytime soon or is it just a side project?
Thank you in advance
2 Likes
We have paused it for now. Sagar has been a huge help to us on other projects that are higher priority.
1 Like
As @MichaelPinkowski mentioned we have paused the multiple company/multiple site projects mostly because we feel that the underlying eCommerce needs look like too long of a road to achieve basic functionality let alone something like parity to Shopify or WooCommerce. @snv has been great at a range of projects and we appreciate his fine efforts!
Although we love the concept of the single source of truth the practical reality of eCommerce today is that we must have external integrations to be a complete company.
In my opinion, there’s no reason to build the functions of apps like ShipStation, or Stamps.com, or MailChimp, or Zapier, etc… into the main system because we’ll always be behind those specialists.
So in real terms like time and small amounts of money we can extend the power of the ERP system into these robust specialized systems that are constantly being updated.
We believe that WooCommerce presents a fine way to keep the master data in the ERP system and have the eCommerce optimized website running on a system specialized for the end-user buying experience which can generate the transactions and then hand the order to the ERP for fulfillment and management.
We believe in the centralized data warehouse for items, CRM, finances, etc… but other sites like those mentioned above and including Kartra and ClickFunnels are purpose-built to accelerate deployment of marketing automation and sales funnels which can then be connected to the backend.
I am sharing this to show the evolution of our position. I wanted and even tried to push as much of the front end into the ERPNext system, but the user experience has been a net negative for our B2B and our D2C customers, therefore, extending additional websites using multiple companies turned out to be a strategy that was not worth pursuing.
Now we’ll focus on WooCommerce integration and Kartra and Zapier integrations which we hope will help sales recover and provide our customers with a more friendly experience with the appropriate data handoffs back to the centralized system.
I hope that makes sense.
5 Likes
any further development on this?
@Sanath_Udayawansa2. No. As stated above, we have been focusing on integrations and don’t have plans to re-visit this project.
1 Like
s this mean i can access my new website from anywhere ?
@omar_salama. I am not sure I understand the question. I would expect that the answer is yes, you can access ERPNext and any public-facing sites that you create from anywhere.
i just try to create multi tenet a lot but i can’t go public with site 2
Could you please elaborate more, where should we put this code after editing it?
I guess in the homepage “Scripts” section?